I could not hit him hard enough

I had a counseling session yesterday. I just fucking love that guy. Every time I leave I want to give him a hug, inappropriate I know, so I just hug him with my eyes. K being on his trip has been so hard on me emotionally…even last night again up at 3:30 crying until 5 or so, because I still haven’t healed from my pain of K abandoning me when we traveled before, including the hurt of him being an asshole with that girl…the start of my ulcer from worrying, having to go to the hospital when I was pregnant because he was out messing around with his “tenant” and I worried myself sick, and so on and so forth. There are just so many things that I can’t get over, and him being in the unknown, not texting me, me imagining the worst scenarios that I can bear, has been so hard to deal with. I said yesterday I feel like I need hard proof that he has slept with someone before I can get over it, and the counselor asked me why?

Why do I have such a hard time thinking that I am worthy of being loved the way I need to be loved. I am worthy of that. But in my mind, I keep thinking that I need K to put me out of misery and sleep with someone and then tell me about it!!!!!! So that I can know it is finally 100% over between us, no going back. NO! I need me to put me out of my misery and live with this pain until it no longer exists. The pain of grief that something wasn’t the way I needed it to be. The pain of loss. I need to change the dialogue in my head from a slow death by way of K, to L, you are worthy of a love that meets your needs. And so I’m just going to keep saying this over and over and over again until I actually believe it. I have given my power away for too long. There is a block in my way that stops me from taking my power back.

The pain also feels more real to me now because I do not have the shiny new distraction of a house that the initial move gave me…then summer…then Christmas. Now it’s just me and little K in my big ol’ house. Alone, truly for the first time ever in my life. I have never been alone. From the age of 14 to 40. Can you believe that? One relationship to the next. I am actually alone now, and I’m okay with that. I’ve been through what I would classify as trauma, and this trauma alters my perception of things, such as the thought I have that love, the way I need it to be, doesn’t exist. I want to be alone, and in this time I can’t imagine it being any other way. It seems an impossibility to me that someone could support me.

The counselor also said something else that struck a chord with me. A big part of my pain is that K does not have the ability or chooses not to acknowledge it in a way that I need it to be acknowledged. And so for a really long time, I have told anyone that would listen. When we were traveling I found plenty of opportunity to tell almost complete strangers about my pain. I remember one time meeting this older couple who had been all over the world and they were staying at the same hotel as us, and I don’t know what was going on but I remember being in the room and thinking I needed to talk to someone and I had to hold myself back from going to knock on that lady’s door and spilling my guts to her about the pain and the misery I was in. The counselor said that our pain needs to be witnessed, that’s why they have victim impact statements and Truth and Reconciliation for residential schools. Our pain needs to be witnessed in order for us to heal from it. That’s why I can’t stop talking about it. The second thing I got from this was that, although I have people close to me who I have talked to about my pain, often times I feel that people don’t understand it because emotional abuse and emotional trauma is a lot harder to explain and understand than if I could just say, he cheated on me, what an asshole. If I say, he was emotionally unavailable and didn’t support me in the way I needed to be supported…he was really fucking mean, people are like, oh okay….it’s so much more complicated, so sometimes when I can’t keep my mouth shut and I hear myself talking about it, I’m like…this isn’t coming out right, you are not getting your point across. It feels way worse than what I am able to articulate, or something like that.

Hopefully one day I’ll have been witnessed enough. After my counseling session I was exhausted and during the night I had a dream about K who was evading my questions in a way that made me think he had slept with another and I was so angry that I started hitting and punching him and trying to physically hurt him as much as my heart hurt. I couldn’t hit him hard enough. I woke up and cried. Then I removed him from my iTunes family sharing, changed the password to my Netflix account and removed seeing his location from my phone. Then I considered hacking into his Facebook account, but quickly changed my mind.

I sent K a message telling him that I can’t be there for him anymore, in the small ways that I have been. I also told him that we need to be our own separate people, completely, so that I can have peace.